The launch of We Were Strangers was a roaring success, even if I do say so myself. The room was packed out, everyone seemed to enjoy the evening, and there were less copies of the book for sale at the end of the night than there had been when we’d started.

Here, for posterity, are some photographs, culled from various sources, including Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Nicholas Royle, the good people at Waterstones Deansgate, my mum (thanks Mum!) and your trusty friend and editor: me.

Many thanks to those who came along. If you didn’t manage to make it, you can still buy your copy from Confingo or Amazon.

Or you can stop by the Deansgate branch of Waterstones where there are a few copies left over from the night.

We Were Strangers, my new book, has had its first review. It’s in The Observer and, friends, it’s an absolute ruddy corker.
 
It’s incredible to get such a positive review, but it’s also great to see one for a short story anthology from a small press which is so detailed and prominent appearing in The Observer. There are a great many indie publishers which have been doing fantastic and daring work for years, frequently on a shoestring, many of them based outside of London, but it finally feels like they may have finally gained the attention they deserve from the national press. It's also rather thrilling to be reviewed by Carol Morley, a novelist but also one of my favourite film directors (if you’ve not done so, do watch The Falling).

You can read her full review here and - hey! - why not pre-order the book here?

I have a new ghost story, titled ‘Lodestones’, coming out in This Dreaming Isle, a brand new collection of stories each of which takes a piece of British folklore and its location as its starting point.
 
At present, it often feels as though we’re all locked into a collective crisis of identity, with what it means to live in this country endlessly contested and squabbled over. What does it mean to be British? Does someone who happens on have been born here have more of a claim to the land they walk on than someone who happens to have been born elsewhere? Whose history is Britain’s history, whose values, whose culture? While the skirmish plays out – tilting further daily into ugliness and racism – the land itself remains, a repository for stories older than those who tell them, stories which survive via their telling, passed on from imagination to imagination, even while the lights begin to go out.

‘Lodestones’ pertains to Manchester, to its endless redevelopment and, dimly, to John Dee, the courtier, alchemist, scientist, theologian, alleged black magician and astrologer to the Queen, who moved to the city in 1596 and, by all accounts, had a bit of a shit time here. It also takes its title and some of its inspiration from ‘Loadstones’, a 2013 song by The Fall which I was listening to a lot while writing it. I was also learning to drive, and as such the story features quite a few descriptions of cars, roads and the correct use of gears. I am nothing if not a complex, mysterious writer.
 
This Dreaming Isle features 'Lodestones' along with fourteen other stories by Alison Moore, Andrew Michael Hurley and the great Ramsey Campbell among others, all of which draw on history and landscape, touch on myth and legend, and look to the past, but also question who we are and what constitutes this ‘we’.
 
The stories for the book are all written and the cover art is ready, but your help is still required. The authors, the artists, editors and the printers all deserve a fair wage. You can get yourself a copy of This Dreaming Isle while also doing your bit to support an independent publisher, Unsung Stories, via its Kickstarter. Here you will find various rewards, including the chance to pick up some of their 2018 titles, including Aliya Whiteley's new novella, The Loosening Skin, at a special price.

We Were Strangers, a brand new book of brand new short stories edited by me, is now available for you to pre-order.
 
I've commissioned ten of my favourite authors to each write a short story which takes its title and inspiration from one of the tracks on Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, making a kind of accompanying fiction playlist which collectively reflects on and responds to the record’s themes, imagery, history and *vibes*.
 
This is the first book I’ve edited. For various reasons, not least its captain’s inexperience, We Were Strangers has navigated a long and at times choppy journey from idle notion to bookshop shelf, but that protracted period of gestation has, in my humble opinion, resulted in a collection of rare quality, definitely one of which I couldn’t possibly be more proud and certainly one you should seek out.
 
For one thing, I struck gold with Confingo, an independent publisher based right here in Manchester who share my belief in books being a good read as well as – just look at the thing – objects bel.
 
Secondly, here is what the table of contents looks like:
 
Side 1

• Disorder – Nicholas Royle
• Day of the Lords – Jenn Ashworth
• Candidate – Jessie Greengrass
• Insight – David Gaffney
• New Dawn Fades – Sophie Mackintosh

Side 2

• She’s Lost Control – Zoe Lambert
• Shadowplay – Toby Litt
• Wilderness – Eley Williams
• Interzone – Louise Marr
• I Remember Nothing – Anne Billson

 
Sounds good, right? Well, it'll be published on 6 September, BUT luckily for you, it’s now available for you to pre-order direct from the publisher’s site here.
 
Or, once it's published, you can get it via Amazon here.
 
Or you can get in touch with your local bookshop. For all you ISBN fans: the ISBN is 9780995596610.
 
Finally, I’ll be hosting the book launch at Waterstones Deansgate on Friday 14 September, with readings from David Gaffney, Zoe Lambert, Sophie Mackintosh and Nicholas Royle, tickets for which are available here.

Something I missed earlier this year was the release of an episode of The Wandering Bard, a podcast on the topic of writing, travel, place and identity, in which myself and Jenn, my occasional collaborator with whom I wrote last year’s The Night Visitors, talk about the north, going on holiday, horror and the role of the artist post-Brexit.

You can listen to the whole thing here.

Here's a photograph of a man who went by the name of Shakespeare Hirst. Was he a relative of mine? I don’t know, but it seems likely given the surname, with its i spelling rather than the more common u, and the fact that he lived in Bolton where my own family come from. His father, Henry Hirst, was the owner of The Shakespeare Hotel, a pub in Huddersfield, and was so obsessed with the Bard that he named his son after him – Shakespeare was his genuine first name, the one he was baptised with – a tradition Shakespeare Hirst himself continued with his own five children: Henry, Cordelia, Ophelia, Miranda and Elsheimer, the latter taken from Adam Elsheimer, an artist supposedly responsible for a lost portrait of William Shakespeare. Hirst eventually took over The Shakespeare Hotel from his father and turned it into a semi-theatre, staging productions of his namesake's works. He also toured as a performer, wrote numerous books about Shakespeare and amassed a large body of art which include works by Leonardo, Raphael and Rubens. He even briefly became something of a celebrity when he claimed to be in the possession of the Elsheimer portrait of Shakespeare, something rightly greeted with scepticism by the press, but with a snobbiness and a sneeriness which I find leaves me feeling oddly defensive of this strange and silly man to whom I may or may not be related.